


Upside Down

by LaLainaJ



Series: Make Some Noise [87]
Category: The Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - X-Files Fusion, Banter, Caroline's pretty skeptical about this whole aliens thing, F/M, Partnership, also this is my 100th thing!, klarolineauweek
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-10
Updated: 2016-10-10
Packaged: 2018-08-24 05:52:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,613
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8359714
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LaLainaJ/pseuds/LaLainaJ
Summary: Babysitting a visiting agent from across the pond had seemed like an easy way for Caroline to get out of her terrible assignment. Key word being "seemed" once Klaus starts talking about aliens.





	

**Upside Down**

**(prompt + the x files!klaroline au that nobody asked for: conspiracy theorist klaus and realist caroline as fbi agents forced to work together and investigate unusual cases the us government would rather deny. Rated K+.)**

Caroline waits for a beat, mouth open and blinking, certain that Klaus  _has_  to be messing with her. It wouldn't be the first time he'd gone out of his way to wind her up. Their partnership has been… bumpy, especially in those first few weeks when they'd been feeling each other out. He'd been tight lipped and reluctant to trust her, she'd taken his long silences and clipped answers to her questions as proof that he was yet another condescending asshat who underestimated her. She'd thought things had been going pretty smoothly lately, that they'd built up a certain amount of respect, developed a camaraderie. Maybe she'd been wrong. Because seriously. Aliens?  _That_  was his explanation? Did he think she was _completely_ gullible?

Klaus seems perfectly unruffled, however. His expression doesn’t reveal a single twitch of amusement or hint that he’s joking. He seems to be waiting, calmly sipping his drink, the pencil he'd been sketching on a bar napkin with tapping out an even rhythm as Caroline gathers her thoughts.

Caroline does the only thing she thinks is appropriate. Her laugh is practically a cackle, her head falling back as she sways on her stool. It ends abruptly, with a cough, when the wine she'd been nursing goes down  _completely_  wrong. Klaus reaches over and taps on her back, a small huff of exasperation leaving him. Caroline shakes him off, glancing around as she tries to get her breathing under control. There's a waitress clearing tables in a corner but the bar is otherwise deserted so at least she's not disturbing anyone with her loud incredulity and appalling manners. Clearing her throat she finally says, "You have  _got_  to be kidding me."

Klaus observes Caroline with a placid expression, still lacking even a flicker of humor. He leans down the bar to pluck a handful of napkins from a holder, offering them to her with a faint smirk, "You dribbled a bit, love."

She rolls her eyes and wipes her mouth, taking a quick glance down to see if she'd be fighting a wine stain in her hotel bathroom later. Luckily her boring blue blouse up remains clean, just rumpled and limp from her long day. Caroline might have cared more about looking less than fresh months ago, when Klaus had first been led into her cramped office. His tie had been slightly askew, stubble shading his jaw as he looked her over, curious and assessing. She'd had to fight the instinct to let her eyes wander, not willing to check him out in front of her boss. Caroline had been unable to help the instinctive urge to smooth her hair and straighten her top. Klaus was attractive and she wasn't blind. Since then he's seen her looking every variety of disheveled so she's lost any urge to primp in his presence. She takes another (daintier) sip of wine and turns to face him properly, her knees grazing his thigh, "Serious question: just _how_ much have you had to drink?" He'd been down in the bar for a good hour while she’d made some calls. Maybe he'd sucked back a bottle of something potent in that time?

He lifts his glass and swirls it pointedly, "This is my second. I'm hardly drunk."

Caroline snatches it out of his hand and Klaus lets out an irritated sigh. She makes a show of sniffing the drink, "Hmm," she muses. "It smells like regular bourbon but you never know. Maybe someone slipped you something? Because I think you might be on some kind of acid trip."

He taps the glass, "Would you like to test it? I'm sure that boy in the lab you flirt with would be happy to rush the results. Though I imagine that squandering department resources would be frowned upon."

Caroline snorts and hands him back the drink, "Like I can get any lower on the totem pole. As it is I'm stuck with…" she cuts herself off, pressing her lips together and cringing. She's mostly gotten over her tendency to let her mouth run away with her – at least professionally. Klaus has a tendency to make her forget to try. She's spent a lot of hours with him, logged thousands of miles. Sometimes her usual filter falls away.

He doesn't appear offended, the corner of his mouth curling up in amusement, "Stuck with me," he finishes for her. "Is it really all that awful? I think it's a rather large improvement over that dingy little office you used to call home. Really, the sheer volume of file boxes shoved in there must have been against some sort of fire safety regulation."

"I had a system," Caroline mutters, refusing to admit that he had a point. Before he'd come along she'd been stuck in an endless nightmare brought on by decades of past agent's shoddy organization and carelessness. Caroline might have loved a project but she'd often been close to screaming trying to untangle the mess that had been foisted on her.

Even if it was _kind of_ her own fault.

Caroline’s supervisor was close to retirement, and harbored some insanely retro ideas about women in law enforcement. She managed to shrug off the other agents calling her Special Agent Barbie, the jokes about how she should double check the safety on her gun, and the constant assumption that somehow the coffee pot was her sole domain. It was harder to bite her tongue when her boss joined in but she rationalized that she only had to endure him for a couple of months before he'd be off wearing tacky shorts in Arizona and out of her way. She told herself that there's no way his replacement could possibly  _also_  be a misogynistic douchebag.

Caroline had thought things would improve when she'd gotten called into his office and he'd told her she'd be getting an  _actual_  case. She'd been stuck doing grunt work since she'd started (and not just any grunt work, the most basic and tedious things imaginable) and she'd completed it all flawlessly and without any complaints (at least within the office - she totally ranted and used some very colorful adjectives in private). She'd been bursting with excitement, at least until she got the details. The case she'd been presented could have charitably been called cold but a more accurate description would have been dead, buried and decomposing. He'd been condescending when they'd spoken and Caroline had gritted her teeth and mentally resolved to make him eat his overly solicitous (and insulting!) words. "Let me know if it's too complicated for you and I'll put Salvatore on it," he'd said, as if Stefan Salvatore would be any help. He was a nice guy but he seemed to spend half his time smoothing things over when his overly reckless brother screwed up in the field. Plus, from what she'd seen, his files were  _atrocious_.

Honestly, how did someone get to adulthood and  _still_  not understand the concept of alphabetization?

She'd pasted on a smile, taken the offered folders, and declined any assistance. She'd kept her shoulders straight as she'd settled down at her desk, and ignored the few interested looks she was getting. Something like dread had begun to settle in her stomach as she'd perused the file, the various notes and reports it contained. The many, _many_ dead ends the case it had ended in over the years it had been open. Caroline’s spirits had plummeted but she'd refused to let it show.

It was a lesson she'd learned long ago watching her mother deal with the small town politics her job as sheriff forced her to endure. Liz Forbes never showed weakness because there was always someone waiting to pounce, to pop up and question if someone else should be doing the job.

Caroline had allowed herself a mini meltdown during her lunch break, away from prying eyes. She'd received a pep talk (from Bonnie) and some masterful reverse psychology (from Kat) and had resolved to close the damn case, whatever she had to do.

Her entire life she’d rarely failed to accomplish something once she set her mind to it, had always taken great pleasure in proving people wrong.

Her boss had set her up to fail and Caroline refused to give him the satisfaction.

It had taken some incredibly long hours, a lot of coffee and a little creativity but in the end Caroline had tied a neat little bow on the case, had four people currently awaiting trial. Her boss had delivered his, "Good work, Forbes" speech looking pinched and sour.

She'd been gleeful and it had been her downfall.

A cheery remark on how things would be so much easier if the old case files she'd combed through weren't all still paper, if they could be accessed electronically and cross referenced had come back to bite her. Hard.

Caroline had been given a new assignment. An awful one. If only she hadn't minored in computer science.

Nearly three months later she'd still been office bound, fighting regular stress headaches from squinting to decipher bad handwriting on yellowed papers. That's how Klaus had found her, buried under a mountain of paper, attempting to bring a little 21st century magic to some old cases. Some of which were pretty damn weird. And okay, more than a little fascinating at times. If only there hadn’t been so many of them.

Honestly, before Klaus had spoken – snarky and far too confident – she’d been thrilled he’d been assigned to her.

It had been a glorified babysitting job in the beginning. Klaus was MI-5, investigating a series of bodies that had been found in Northumberland. All had been found at the base of a white oak tree, with crude bracelets of leaves and twigs wrapped around each wrist, an odd symbol carved into the tree's bark above where they’d lain. He'd told her he'd exhausted leads in England but had found a small mention to similar happenings in Virginia, North Carolina and Tennessee in the 1960's online. It was some kind of message board for conspiracy theory types – apparently the story had turned into an urban legend. With nothing better to go on he'd begun digging deeper and had eventually turned up a couple of newspaper articles that seemed to corroborate the story. With nothing better to go on he'd lobbied hard to travel to the US and had managed to swing permission (one of his victims the son of a fairly important foreign dignitary cutting through all sorts of red tape) to see if he could find anything that would help him solve the case.

Which had brought him to her dingy little office. As Caroline was the current keeper of cases of the weird, old or unsolved varieties Klaus had become her problem. She couldn't have anticipated, that first day when she'd shaken his hand and made small talk, just how big, or how complicated, a problem he would turn out to be.

They’d crisscrossed the eastern seaboard in the last few weeks, tracking down people who were mentioned in the old case files, digging for the faintest hint of anything new or helpful, managing to find precious little. Maybe that’s why Klaus was clearly going insane?

Furrowing her eyebrows Caroline leans in, trying to see if Klaus’ pupils look normal. "Okay so you haven't had enough booze to explain the crazy talk. Do you take any prescriptions? Something that has wonky side effects or…"

Klaus drains the bourbon, setting the glass firmly on the bar and turning to face her, "I can assure you that I am perfectly lucid. Would you like me to recite the alphabet backwards for you?"

He sounds irked and Caroline feels a twinge or irritation grow, "First of all, no need to get snippy, okay? When one's asked to accept that  _extra-terrestrials_  are the perp she's chasing one's allowed to be a teeny bit skeptical."

His posture relaxes, the tense set of his jaw softening. Klaus nods and Caroline knows him well enough to understand that's as much of a concession as she's likely to get. "You might have a point," he tells her. "And it's possible I've not given you every detail I'm privy to."

Well now that just won't do. "Um, what?" she asks sharply.

Most people would shy away when she uses that particular tone but Klaus' wince is minor. "It's sensitive information. I couldn't be sure that you could be trusted with it. But surely you've noted the abnormalities in the autopsy reports?"

Caroline had, of course. There had been eight victims from the 1960's and several oddities had been noted by the ME's who'd examined the bodies. No trace of malnourishment or dehydration and yet there'd been nothing to be found when the stomach contents had been examined. Time of death had been murky in each case. There'd been no effort to hide the bodies, and the areas they'd been found in weren't remote. And yet decomposition had suggested they'd each died weeks before they'd been found. And then there was the fact that six of the victims had never been identified despite seeming in good health overall. No missing persons reports, no grieving families, no criminal records.

Those things had nagged at her but she'd chalked it up to the years that had passed, assumed things had been lost along the way. She might have to re-examine, since it seemed like Klaus had been holding out on her.

Something they would  _definitely_  be addressing later.

"Why do you trust me now?" Caroline finds herself asking. She was surprised by how much it stung hearing that he'd doubted her.

Klaus takes a long moment, clearly thinking his answer over. "You're very… determined. You've chosen a path and you're sticking to it no matter how small minded and difficult those around you are. I didn't think you were much for thinking outside the box."

A fair assumption, Caroline could admit. She drums her fingers on the bar top, "You've come to think differently?" she wonders, curious about just what's changed.

"I've seen you bend the rules when it suits you, sweetheart. Cleverly, I'll admit. You're rather more resourceful that I'd expected."

Also accurate. She might  _know_  every single rule in the book but she was fully aware that some of them weren't worth her time. And if operating slightly outside of them was more efficient and effective well, wasn't that the important thing?

Caroline was a firm believer in getting shit done.

She glances over her shoulder, catches the waitress' attention before turning back to Klaus. "You're going to buy me a drink. Because my salary sucks and I know you're getting your travel expenses reimbursed. Then you're going to tell me  _everything_."

"Am I?" Klaus asks, though he sounds more amused than contrary. "And then what?"

That's a question Caroline can't answer. Maybe Klaus has actually gone nutty and she'll have to google involuntary psych holds once he's done.

Somehow she doubts it.

She's going to bet that she'll need more than one drink. That she'll end up the kind of wasted she'd accused Klaus of being. She'll probably end up severely regretting her life choices tomorrow but she saw a diner down the street, the kind that probably did a killer hangover breakfast. She'd make Klaus buy that too.

It really was the least a guy could do when he managed to make you question the whole frigging universe.


End file.
